My two cents, not the opinion of all my fellow fans...
I personally don't feel it's a systems thing, the problems are more often than not from bad pinches, bad passes and just poor decisions in general.
Disagree. I don't believe you can rule out the system as a problem. We have literally had at least 3 iterations of of Gully's system. And I'm not talking about tweaking the system to match another team. They're totally different systems. I will not disagree with anyone that our dmen are far too aggressive with Brodie being the worst for getting way out of position. However, I think Hamonic is also asked to be too aggressive and isn't playing the stay at home style we hoped he would. We had Russell and Engelland start joining the rush in Hartley's and Gully's systems. I blame the system for requesting the dmen to take way too much risk. IMO Gully needs to reign in the risk the dmen are taking.
Forwards - Passive
Dmen -High risk pinching
Goalie - Risky puck play
It's a double edged sword with that much damn risk in the system.
Year 1
- Gully 1.0 (Never fully deployed). A vastly different system than Hartley's system. While I'm unsure of his exact system, it seems like collapsing in front of the net and stretch pass was replaced by defensive zone perimeter play with little board battling and holding the blue line. I think Gully wanted the team to play a cycle game. PP and PK was abysmal as it relied on a weird cycle game that the team wasn't familiar with.
- Gully 2.0 (Gully/Hartley hybrid?). The sudden surge late in year 1. Seemed like a Dzone perimeter play/hold blue line + neutral zone rush. We seemed to have success with it.
Year 2
- Gully 3.0 (Smith mode). A completely different style that relied heavily upon using the goalie to play the puck. The season started off with the players completely confused at the positioning of this style and we'd see up to 3 players bunching together on occasion. Forwards weren't sure how far to go back, defenders weren't sure how far forward to go. Formation wise, with all forwards in the neutral zone and sometimes a dman often meant the players had no room to work with. We saw this where players could barely string together 3-5 foot passes. Gully also modified his perimeter play to reduce screened shots on net.
- Gully 1.5 (Lack mode). A similar system to Gully 1.0, whatever it was supposed to be, but with an extra player chasing guys in the board battles or something. Though there was significant talk about bringing back Eddie Lack of Vancouver era (because Carolina tried to modify his play style and failed), I felt like Lack was still asked to try and tweak his game so that the team could play closer to Gully 3.0. Horrific results really.
Dec 2 vs Edmonton should be an interesting case study in the third period alone for systems. It wasn't just a surge. It was IMO a completely different style. I don't know whether it was spurred on by Gully or the players tuning him out though.
All this... and yet...
- Gully's system broke the Honda Curse. Whatever it was, it was a distraction he successfully dismantled.
- Gully's system(s) brought the team to the playoffs last season (first year) and currently is over .500. He's not the next Eakins much to the chagrin to some of our fans who want him fired, but we worry about sustained mediocrity.
- More structure than Hartley, though IMO this is like Aesop's fable of the fox and the cat. Fox has a bag of tricks, cat has one. Fox dies because he cannot decide what trick to use to avoid the hunter.
- His system(s) are arguably not even properly deployed yet as mentioned in the the interviews and such.
- His system keeps our players ridiculously healthy. Other than Jagr and Versteeg, we haven't really had any injuries.
